Global warming – is it a lot of hot air?

Risk managers are often advised to prepare for the impact of global warming. However, leading broker and risk advisor Paul Maynard believes the dangers and implications have been grossly distorted. This article was co-written with Christopher Mockton of Brenchley, an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report on climate change.

In the bitterly-fought US election, dire predictions about the future owing to manmade global warming disappeared completely. However, having dodged the issue during the campaign, Barack Obama made this remark in his victory speech:

“We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened up by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”

Clearly, a reference to man-made global warming and the damage caused by extra-tropical storm Sandy. But inconveniently, the warming has not been occurring at anything like the rate the models predicted. Nor was Sandy the exceptional event, the Frankenstorm, that many of the forecasters of doom announced with religious certainty. It was not even a hurricane at landfall.

Warming – what warming?

It was interesting that Obama referred to “destructive ... warming” a term that has been dropped by most alarmists in favour of “climate change”. No doubt this is attributable to the absence of any statistically-significant warming in at least the past 16 years, and very little since the satellite record began in 1979, as illustrated in the diagrams below.

Global mean surface temperature anomalies, January 1997 to August 2012, showing a 16-year zero trend. Image source: Global Warming Policy Foundation.

UAH global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies from the 1981-2010 30-year mean over the entire period of satellite microwave-sounding unit operation, 1979-2012. The record shows two periods of no significant warming, of which the most recent is marked by the green arrowed lines (added to Dr. Spencer’s graph by the authors), flanking a sudden, sharp warming between the cooling caused by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991 and the Great El Niño of 1998, a naturally-occurring event that has occurred only twice before in the past 300 years. This step-change in global temperature is not consistent with – and, inferentially, not primarily driven by – the near-monotonic year-on-year increases in the partial pressure of CO2 over the period.

Since the First Assessment Report in 1990, the IPCC has been projecting warming at a rate of 0.2-0.3 Cº/decade. The Fourth Assessment Report, 2007 (table SPM.3 and fig. 10.26) implicitly projects as the mean of all six of its emissions scenarios that Man’s influence, with an increase in CO2 concentration from 368 ppmv in 2000 to 710 ppmv by 2100, will cause 2.8 ºC of warming. The emissions scenarios are derived from complex econometric models that project various versions of the future, assuming different levels of fossil-fuel dependence and economic growth. However, the IPCC itself admits that, even today, our understanding of the climate and the forces that drive it is poor. This includes such fundamental areas as precipitation, cloud formation and the thermohaline circulation of the world’s oceans. The climate models all presume that CO2 is what one of their creators has called “the tuning knob” of the climate.

The problem for the IPCC is that the observed warming rate has turned out to be below its lowest estimate. The post-1950 warming trend in the Hadley/CRU surface temperature series (HadCRUt3, 2011) is 1.2 Cº/century. The IPCC’s predicted 233% increase over the observed warming rate, taking us to 2.8 Cº by 2100, depends on a number of assumptions, the most important of which is that unmeasured and probably immeasurable positive “temperature feedbacks” near-triple the direct warming from greenhouse gases.

Even the IPCC admits that the maximum direct impact of a doubling of CO2 is less than 1.2 Cº. The much hyped “dangerous” warming of 3 Cº or more is only achieved through positive feedback. The typical example is that any warming increases the capacity of the atmosphere to hold water vapour, a more potent warming influence than trace gases such as CO2 and methane. However the fact that a warmer atmosphere can carry more water vapour does not mean that it will. Furthermore, empirical evidence (e.g. Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010, 2011), though hotly contested (e.g. Trenberth et al., 2010; Dessler et al., 2010, 2011), confirms that feedbacks in the climate system are at most barely net-positive and are more probably net-negative, consistent with a harmless continuance of the past 60 years’ warming rate. Every year there is a demonstration of the absence of this positive feedback as temperatures rise into summer but do not lead to runaway climate change.

Predictions of doom have failed
Growth in Antarctic sea-ice extent substantially mitigates the Arctic decline since 1979 (Cryosphere Today, 2012). Greenland’s land-based ice grew by a mean 0.5 m in thickness from 1993-2004 (e.g. Johannessen et al., 2005), though it has lost 0.1 m of that increase since 2005. Antarctica has cooled for 30 years (IPCC, 2007). Tropical-cyclone activity has been at a 30-year low (Maue, 2012). Satellite data (Aviso Envisat, 2012) show sea level rising from 2004-2012 at 3 cm/century. In 2011/12, sea level actually fell.

Even if we assume. for the sake of argument, that our unmitigated emissions will much accelerate observed warming, the high cost of CO2-mitigation policies exceeds the likely cost of climate-related damage arising from failure to act now. To take a topical, typical example, carbon trading in Australia will cost $10.1 bn/year, plus $1.6 bn/year for administration (Wong, 2010, p. 5), plus $1.2 bn/year for renewables and other costs, a total of $13 bn/year, rising at 5%/year, or $130 bn by 2020 at p.v., to abate 5% of current emissions, which represent 1.2% of world emissions (derived from Boden et al., 2010ab).

Thus the Australian measure, even if it succeeded as intended, would abate just 0.06% of global emissions over its 10-year term. On the same basis, the cost of abating all projected warming worldwide over the term would be $300 trillion, or $44,000/head, or 58% of global GDP. The cost of mitigation by such measures would exceed the cost of climate-related damage consequent upon inaction by a factor of 50.

To take another example, shutting down the US economy altogether would mitigate one-twelfth of a Celsius degree of warming by 2050, or one-sixth of a degree by 2100. Any benefit is outweighed at least tenfold by the cost.

The high costs of CO2 mitigation and the undetectable returns in warming abated imply that focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such warming as may occur will be far more cost-effective than attempted mitigation today. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable.

The obsession with CO2 is leading to a global misallocation of capital to green energy schemes that at best will achieve nothing and at worst are destructive. One example is wind power. Forget the arguments of its advocates about falling costs and “carbon-free” electricity. It is simply too unreliable to power a modern economy and can only work because of the spinning reserve of fossil-fuel-based generation. Would you buy a car or a computer that chose to work only 24% of the time? That is why we abandoned wind power 200 years ago. Another absurdity is biofuels, which are now consuming as much as 40% of the US corn crop, doubling food prices around the world in the past few years. Naturally, it is the poor that suffer most.

So far, the UK is in the thrall of the CO2 cult and is committed to economy-threatening policies that will drive jobs away from the UK. They will not be replaced by subsidy-driven green jobs. To take one example, the $2 billion (yes, $2 billion) subsidy to the Thanet wind array, the world’s largest wind farm, will create just 38 permanent jobs at a cost of $57 million per “green job”. Green jobs are the new unemployment. However, the anger amongst ordinary voters is growing. Whilst it is now politically correct for the corporate and public sectors to wrap themselves in green propaganda, what will happen when the truth becomes plain to all?

Paul Maynard, chief placement officer at Willis UK , wrote this article in a purely personal capacity.  Lord Monckton is a past adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He is a well-known manmade climate change sceptic and has spoken widely around the world on this subject.

A full list of references can be viewed by clicking here

Paul Maynard, chief placement officer at Willis UK